By Bridget Huber for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

In January 2019, students at Lovin Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, took a hard look at how much food they were throwing away. It was Taco Day, and as lunch period wrapped up, teacher Gerin Hennebaul and a group of students sorted the milk, fruit, vegetables, and other foods left on the cafeteria trays into buckets. “It really left an impact on the kids,” Hennebaul says. “They were shocked.”

The students weighed the waste and found that that day’s lunch, served to 721 kids, generated nearly 600 pounds of food waste. About 75 pounds of it was fruits and vegetables, and 120 pounds was still edible: unopened milk cartons, bags of baby carrots and sliced apples.

With more than 95,000 schools across the country serving lunch each day, that waste adds up. About 530,000 tons of food and 45 million gallons of milk is wasted in U.S. school cafeterias each year, the World Wildlife Fund estimates, which translates into about $1.7 billion worth of uneaten food. 

Dumping food in landfills releases methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. And wasting food indirectly drives extinction; agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss around the world — converting wild lands to cropland, diverting or polluting rivers and lakes, and pesticide use destroys habitats that wildlife need to survive. To tackle the environmental toll of landfilling all that food, environmental groups, like the World Wildlife Fund, have been working for about a decade with nearly 250 schools nationwide, including Lovin Elementary, to reduce waste but also to educate kids about the broader connection between the food they eat and issues like climate change and biodiversity loss. 

As Pete Pearson, the WWF’s senior director of food loss and waste, explains, making the cafeteria a classroom helps reduce waste now, and hopefully will produce a generation that’s more environmentally responsible than their parents. “When you get a school that is saying, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at our cafeteria, let’s understand the connection of food to the environment,’ then students start asking questions,” he says. 

Efforts to address food waste at the federal level have been less aggressive — but there are signs that’s starting to change. The U.S. has committed to halving the nation’s food waste by 2030. In December, the Biden administration proposed a national strategy to meet that goal, and tackling food waste at schools is part of the plan. But the USDA, which is responsible for feeding students, has not yet made cutting food waste a core part of school nutrition programs. Rather than wait for help from Washington, a handful of states, including Vermont and California, have passed or are considering laws making it illegal to throw away food scraps, which puts pressure on school districts to find ways to keep food waste out of landfills.

After Lovin Elementary’s first food audit, students started delivering PSAs during the morning announcements; one of their big messages was that taking milk at lunch isn’t mandatory, a common misconception that creates a lot of waste. They began feeding leftovers from the teachers’ salad bar to the school’s chickens. And Hennebaul set up a share table, where kids deposit unpeeled fruits and unopened packaged food, like granola bars. There’s a fridge for milk and baby carrots. Throughout the day, kids take and leave things from the table. Every morning it starts off empty, fills up, and then ends up empty again, Hennebaul says.

In March 2019, the school did another audit and found that waste had dropped from 589 to 435 pounds. The amount of discarded veggies fell to 47 pounds, and 108 pounds of edible food was sent to the share table instead of to the landfill. 

Since then — pandemic disruptions aside — Lovin has gradually ramped up composting; this year it has composted around 5,000 pounds of food. Most of the scraps go to the school’s garden, and some are shared with a local organization that trains adults with developmental disabilities to garden and compost. 

The food-waste program has led to many learning opportunities, Hennebaul says. Third graders teach kindergarteners how to compost and sort garbage, for instance, and measuring waste yields lessons on volume and decimals and how microorganisms break down food. The hope is that the big lesson — that food is not garbage — sticks too.

As schools like Lovin have tackled food waste piecemeal, some best practices have emerged. Audits are key; “unless you see it, it’s not real,” Pearson says. Share tables are a reliable way to cut waste and get food to kids who need it. Letting kids choose the foods they want at lunch, instead of serving everyone the same thing — a model called “offer vs. serve” — is another strategy that works. So is addressing milk waste. In addition to making sure students know they don’t have to take milk, some schools have replaced milk cartons with dispensers that let kids take as much or little as they want.

Advocates and researchers are trying to go beyond the school-by-school approach and collect data that can inform a comprehensive strategy for reducing food waste in schools on the state and national level. The EPA recently awarded the World Wildlife Fund $1.1 million to work with schools in Atlanta, Baltimore, Memphis, and Nashville to promote food waste reduction starting next fall. 

And in Maine, four public elementary schools of varying sizes took part in a pilot program last year, led by University of Maine researchers, that began with a waste audit and included sharing baskets for uneaten food and educational components. Kids watched a slideshow, for instance, that explained what they did and did not have to take in the cafeteria line, and that made explicit the links between food and the environment. One slide, titled “What happens when food goes in the trash?”, showed a photo of a polar bear clinging to a fragment of ice and a truck dumping garbage into a landfill. 

Over the nine-week course of the pilot, the schools cut waste by about 14 percent, saving a quarter-ton of food. Based on these results, the researchers estimated that putting a similar program in place statewide could reduce food waste by up to 325 tons, saving 4,263 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — about as much as taking 1,000 cars off the road.

Next year, with funding from the World Wildlife Fund, the researchers plan to expand the study. Finding ways to reduce waste in Maine schools is made even more urgent by the fact that it’s one of a small but growing number of states that now serve meals free to all students, regardless of family income, which has led to an uptick in the number of kids eating at those schools—and thus to the prospect of more waste.

While she supports efforts to make school food free to all students, Susanne Lee, a faculty fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, who led the Maine study, says expanding school food programs makes it even more imperative to develop policies at the state and federal level to address waste. “Who wouldn’t want to feed kids?” she said. “But if the kids are already throwing away forty percent of the food that we’re giving them, how is it helping?”

On a recent day at Sebago Elementary School, which took part in the Maine pilot, students filed into the lunch room, starting at a salad bar, where red peppers, cucumbers, and other vegetables were cut into large chunks. Kids waste less produce when they can choose what they take, and when it’s cut into kid-friendly forms, explains Morgan Therriault, the school’s food service director. Until recently, the school donated its food scraps to a local pig farmer, but the farmer retired and until they find another, the scraps are going in the trash.

At Sebago Elementary, lunchtime was unhurried and surprisingly calm. Kids have 30 minutes to eat. Experts say giving kids enough time to eat helps reduce wasted food, too, though schools that have to move many students through a small cafeteria often only give kids 15 to 20 minutes. Some schools, like Lovin Elementary, have experimented with playing music during some of the lunch period and asking kids to focus on eating—rather than socializing—while the music is on. Others feed kids lunch after recess, hoping they’ll work up an appetite and get most of their chattering done before sitting down to eat. 

Therriault says her school’s small size — just over 100 students — has advantages and disadvantages when it comes to addressing food waste. She and another staff member prepare and serve all of the food, so they see what kids like (tacos) and what they throw out (fish sticks). And the amount of waste generated is manageable enough that Therriault was able to bring the buckets to the pig farmer herself. The downside is staffing. The school’s food-waste work was started by a teacher with a passion for it, but he retired, leaving Therriault to continue the work on her own. Balancing cutting waste with making sure that everyone is fed and that kids with allergies are safe is a lot to manage, she says, and it’s hard to imagine growing the program without more support. 

Making sure that food waste reduction programs are sustainable and long-lasting is a real challenge. WWF has been pushing the federal government to make food waste reduction a key part of the USDA’s school meals programs, and Pearson says there’s political resistance to putting more money into nutrition programs. Legislation like the School Food Recovery Act, a bipartisan House bill that would give grants to help schools cut food waste, hasn’t passed. But gathering more data on what works could help make the case, and Pearson says he’s optimistic that waste reduction programs have bipartisan support.

“I think the problem always comes back to having to invest some money into it,” he says. 

But if schools can get a program in place, it takes on a life of its own, says Lee, the Maine researcher. “If you start those kids in elementary school, they will then be asking when they get to the middle school, ‘Where are our separate waste bins at lunch? Food shouldn’t go in the trash.’” 

At Lovin Elementary that’s exactly what’s happening. Other elementary schools in the district have begun composting, as has the high school. “You’re just watching it become part of our culture at school,” Hennebaul says, “and just part of who we are and what we do.”


Bridget Huber wrote this article for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.


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A new study found Maine households are a leading contributor of food waste in local landfills, which in turn contributes to climate change.

Researchers said as the waste breaks down, it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Susanne Lee, faculty fellow for the Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Science at the University of Maine, said reducing food waste is one of the easiest ways to solve the problem.

"Not everybody can get a new electric vehicle but everybody can shop more wisely, do meal planning," Lee pointed out.

Lee noted new data on where and how food waste is generated will be added to the state's climate plan. She argued it could help in building the needed infrastructure to transport, store and distribute excess food from farms and businesses. About one in eight Mainers experienced food insecurity in 2022, including one in five children.

A recent pilot program helped four elementary schools in Maine reduce their food waste by up to 20% while improving kids' nutrition. Students learned about waste in landfills and got a close-up look at their own waste by sorting their scraps and trash. Lee believes early education programs will be key to helping Mainers build sustainable habits and ensure the state reaches its own climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2045.

"A simple 10-minute explanation of how food is meant to be nutritious and not meant to be trash," Lee explained. "These children can get it."

Lee added new funding will allow researchers to continue the elementary school programs and even follow one school's students into middle school to see if their new habits stick. Legislators are also considering an outright ban on food waste in landfills, something already enacted in every other New England state.

By Meg Wilcox for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

At Johnny’s Luncheonette, a family-style diner in the greater Boston area serving sandwiches and breakfast all day, customers can take their meal to go in a lime-green, durable plastic container that is borrowed like a library book and designed to be reused hundreds, if not thousands, of times by other restaurant patrons.

Customers don’t pay extra for the reusable take-out box. They simply need to download an app called Recirclable, and—to avoid paying a $15 fee—return the container within two weeks to one of 14 restaurants participating in Recirclable’s reuse program.

Johnny’s Luncheonette is among a small but growing number of restaurants taking steps to move away from single-use plastic take-out containers, which usually end up in the trash because they can’t be recycled. Worse yet, mismanaged plastic waste eventually enters the oceans, where it kills sea creatures that ingest it and breaks apart into toxic microplastics the size of a lentil or smaller.

Restaurants and food services use nearly 1 trillion pieces of disposable food service ware and packaging annually in the U.S., according to Upstream, a reuse advocacy organization.

Johnny’s Luncheonette began offering the reusable take-out containers earlier this year because its owner, Kay Masterson, was tired of the Sisyphean search for an environmentally friendly disposable take-out box. “Ideas like Recirclable are a much better option because it takes out the conversation of, ‘Well, which takeout container is less bad?’” she said. “Reuse is just smart. It’s smart resource-wise. It’s smart cost-wise.”

Masterson pays more per piece for the reusable packaging but said that she expects costs will drop below disposable packaging as more customers use the service. Thus far, only dozens of customers have selected the reusable option.

Many case studies show that while reusable containers cost more upfront, businesses start to save fairly quickly. What’s more, “It’s not just about saving money but about building resiliency so that you have shorter supply chains without so much global dependency,” said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop America, at Reloop, a nonprofit operating in both Europe and the U.S.

Moving from single use to reuse is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing plastic pollution, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a reuse pioneer. Reuse services targeting food businesses are growing quickly in the U.S., especially for arenas and stadiums, colleges and K-12 schools, corporate offices, and other institutions.

Startups offering logistics and dishwashing are proliferating, as are nonprofit organizations providing strategic support, funding, and advocacy. But reuse is still far from the norm in the U.S. Communities need shared reuse infrastructure for the practice to pick up steam, according to Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of Upstream. Cohesive, city-scale systems could help shift consumer habits and increase the volume of materials being reused, which is essential for both economic and environmental impact. Enabling policies would hasten the transition.

“You can’t have consumers running all over town, dropping off things in [different] places. You’re going to need big infrastructure that will accommodate this massive systemic change away from disposable to reusable,” Dreisbach said.

Reuse on the Rise

Reuse services are emerging in cities across the country, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Startups like Vessel and Turn Systems offer customers a reusable cup option at the point of sale that can be returned at kiosks or bins. DeliverZero provides reusable take-out containers at some 150 restaurants in New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and California, and at Whole Foods stores in Boulder. Usefull offers stainless steel containers on college campuses. Bold Reuse services large venues in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Kansas City, and Phoenix, while Dispatch Goods in San Francisco and ReUso in Chicago serve restaurants and institutions.

Dishwashing and sanitizing systems are also emerging, since they’re key to any reuse system. Restaurants handle their own dishwashing in Recirclable’s system. Other reuse companies provide dishwashing, including via mobile units at large venues, or contract it out to large washing stations like Re:Dish, which operates in New York City and Philadelphia and is equipped with technologies for tracking and sorting packaging.

ReThink Disposable provides free reuse consulting to restaurants, institutions, and large venues in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England. The nonprofit also raises funding to buy reusable packaging and/or install dishwashers at restaurants and food delivery programs run by nonprofits, such as Truro Community Kitchen.

Reusable containers come in ceramic, glass, stainless steel, and plastic, depending on the venue, but, for takeout, “most restaurant owners prefer durable, No. 5 plastic [polypropylene type] because they store and stack easily,” are lightweight, and can be microwaved, said Amber Schmidt, New England zero-waste specialist at ReThink Disposable.

While “reusable plastic may be an imperfect solution, it is still a critically important step in the right direction,” toward an overall reduction in plastic packaging, Balkan said.

Volume Is Key

Recirclable was co-founded in 2021 by Margie Bell, who worked for decades on ecommerce and point-of-sale applications in the software industry. “Our vision was, ‘Let’s have this happening at every restaurant and, like library books, you borrow at one and you return to another.’” 

Recirclable’s volume is small. Its users are dedicated customers who follow it from restaurant to restaurant, Bell told Civil Eats. “We’re in the thousands—and we’d love to be in the tens and hundreds of thousands—but we have to grow the network” of restaurants.

“The biggest hurdle with Recirclable is just getting the word out there and changing habits,” said Masterson.

Recirclable’s small network of restaurants also limits its growth. Customers must live near a restaurant where they can return the container, or the system doesn’t work for them. The number of steps required is another barrier. Johnny’s Luncheonette Manager David Martinez said that when some interested people learn they have to download an app and put in their credit card, they decline.

“We recognize that can cause friction,” said Bell, who won an award from the EPA to develop a new system, launching this year, that will be accessed with one tap of a credit card.

Recirclable is not alone in having difficulty reaching volume—“the cornerstone” of reuse, Dreisbach said. “You cannot make the system work, you cannot make the economics work, until you have volume.”

Re:Dish’s washing station in Brooklyn, for example, can handle 75,000 reusables daily, but “we’re not anywhere near there right now,” CEO and founder Caroline Vanderlip told Civil Eats. Re:Dish is on track to handle 4.5 million containers this year, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion pieces of packaging used in the food sector, she said.

Transformational Change

To scale up reuse, Dreisbach envisions municipal waste and recycling centers becoming reuse centers. Reuse represents “a really cool new revenue stream” for recycling facilities, which struggle with volatility in recovered materials markets, she said.

Private investment, government funding—including from the Inflation Reduction Act—and forward service contracts with large anchor clients such as arenas could support such infrastructure development. The nonprofit Perpetual, in fact, is now working to design and implement city-scale reusable food service ware solutions in collaboration with Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hilo, Hawaii; Galveston, Texas; and Savannah, Georgia.

Laws mandating reuse would hasten the transition, as they have in Europe, where reuse is more widespread, Balkan told Civil Eats. Oregon, California, and Maine have passed laws moving in this direction that will raise funds for reuse, she said.

But big consumer brands also need to lead the way on shaping consumer attitudes about reuse, said Driesbach. “They have a great deal of power to decide what that packaging is,” she said, adding that consumers are ready for reuse. “COVID really showed us what appeared in our trash cans at home because we were all getting takeout. Awareness about trash has increased hugely in the last five years.”


Meg Wilcox wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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By Claire Elise Thompson for Grist.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for New Hampshire News Connection, reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

At a library in Dover, New Hampshire, earlier this year, the shelves of books and CDs typically available for lending were accompanied by something else - racks of clothes. Every Sunday and Monday from December through mid-January, community members could visit a lecture hall in the Dover Public Library to participate in the pilot of a new type of lending project: a clothing library. Visitors could check out up to five garments for two weeks at a time. The collection focused on "occasion wear," the types of things people might buy for the purpose of wearing once: a holiday party dress, a wedding outfit, a ski trip ensemble.

But more than displacing those types of purchases, and the resulting waste, the real idea behind the project was to facilitate a shift in behavior, said Stella Martinez McShera, the clothing library's creator. "How can we bridge the gap between people buying, whether that's new or secondhand, to borrowing?"

I met McShera while reporting another newsletter story on the world's first degrowth master's program, run by a university in Barcelona. She's a recent graduate of the online master's, and the clothing library was her thesis project. In that story, we explored what happens when the philosophical ideas of a new economic system meet the realities of the one we have. McShera's project is one example of what that looks like in practice.

McShera started her career in fashion. In 2000, she launched the first fashion incubator in the U.S. But as much as she loved the essence of fashion, she knew that the industry was guilty of horrifying human rights abuses, pollution, and waste. She had long been interested in circular fashion, but she came to feel that even a circular approach was not enough to get to the root of all the ills associated with fast fashion. When she discovered degrowth and the master's program, it became a proving ground for her ideas about replacing fast fashion and extraction with borrowing and being resourceful with what already exists.

McShera started building her clothing library pilot by collecting surplus garments from local thrift and vintage stores. It's estimated that thrift stores sell only about 20 percent of the donated clothing they receive. Even vintage boutiques and curated consignment shops will end up getting rid of some garments they weren't able to sell in a set time. "They have to cycle stuff in," she said. "So even if it's something really cute, maybe they overpriced it at the thrift store, or maybe it just didn't sell in two weeks because it's a sweater and it's unseasonably warm."

Just from local secondhand shops, McShera quickly gathered over 5,000 garments - even more than she could take, she said. She donated her own surplus to a housing shelter, winnowing the library collection down to about 1,500 items.

McShera kicked off the launch with a fashion show in the stacks. Professionally coiffed librarians modeled items from the collection for photographers and a crowd of over 160 attendees. "It was so much fun," said Denise LaFrance, the Dover library's director. The fashion show was the biggest indoor event at the library in her 25-year tenure. "I mean, seriously, people still are talking about it."

During the pilot, McShera also hosted an eco-fashion panel and three workshops on mending and styling, intended to help people think differently about their relationship to their wardrobes. "Because it's free, people were more willing to experiment with their style," McShera said. There was no guilt or shame associated with returning something, because returning was an understood part of the process.

LaFrance borrowed, among other things, a pair of gray silk pants that she remembered loving, even though they weren't the type of thing she would typically shop for. When she checked them out, they still had their original price tag attached. They retailed for about $400. "I would never buy $400 pants," she said. "But they were fabulous."

Over just 12 days of being open, McShera said, the library saw over a hundred people come through, and 65 borrowed something. And of the more than 100 garments that were checked out during the library's pilot, all of them came back clean and in good condition.

"It's the commoning of clothing," McShera said. "It's free access versus ownership."

With the pilot concluded, and McShera's thesis complete, she's now looking toward the next steps of bringing clothing libraries to fruition in her community and beyond. She presented the concept at the 10th International Degrowth Conference last week in Spain, and plans to publish a manual that will empower community members all over the world to start their own projects, in partnership with their local libraries. Someday, she'd like to see a network of clothing libraries - sharing resources and knowledge, advocating for policy change, and possibly even swapping clothes to help keep their collections fresh.

Although she feels there's more testing to be done, a few more local libraries in her area have already expressed interest in hosting a pilot, she noted.

"The most difficult thing about this was space and time," said LaFrance. The library is in an old building, she said, "and we're kind of bursting at the seams." She suspects that most libraries would be similarly pressed to carve out space for a small shop's worth of clothing racks. One thing she suggested to McShera was a setup more like a traveling bus.

But McShera's ultimate vision is to integrate clothing into the normal functioning of a library. "The reason I wanted the model to be in partnership with the public libraries is because the behavior's normal. People already know, I go in and I borrow," she said. She added that libraries tend to be centrally located in cities and neighborhoods, highly visible and easily reachable by foot or transit. And many libraries - including Dover's - already branch out from books, lending things like tools, games, and music.

"This just seems like a logical next step," she said.

Rather than a pop-up in an event room, she envisions a future where clothing racks could find a permanent home in the library. There could even be regular staff members with fashion expertise who could steward the collections. "Just like if someone needs help using the photocopier or help researching something, you ask the librarian for help," McShera said. "So if you wanted some help styling, you could say, 'Hey, is there a clothing librarian on shift today?'"


Claire Elise Thompson wrote this article for Grist.


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